Heggie’s Whale Arrives at the Met • March 2025
New York, New York
Brandon Jovanovich leads the cast of Moby-Dick as Captain Ahab
Photo by Karen Almond / The Metropolitan Opera
Jake Heggie’s 2010 opera Moby-Dick made its Metropolitan Opera premiere this March, following the highly acclaimed Dead Man Walking on opening night of the Met’s 23/24 season. With a libretto by Gene Scheer, the Leonard Foglia production featured a star-studded cast led by Brandon Jovanovich, Stephen Costello, Peter Mattei, Ryan Speedo Green, Janai Brugger, Malcolm MacKenzie, and William Burden, with Karen Kamensek on the podium. Jake spoke with press outlets around the world in advance of his second opera to be mounted at the Met.
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New York Classical Review: Moby-Dick is a Critic’s Choice for 2024-25 Season
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Revolver Magazine: See Mastodon discuss 'Leviathan' and the Met's new 'Moby-Dick' Opera
Associated Press: ‘Moby-Dick’ docks at the Met
Playbill: How the Late Terrence McNally Inspired Composer Jake Heggie to Write a Moby-Dick Opera
The New York Times: Taming the ‘Howling Infinite’: ‘Moby Dick’ Comes to the Met’s Stage
Metropolitan Opera: Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer on Moby-Dick
Critical Acclaim
The cast of Moby-Dick in a production by Leonard Foglia
Photo by Karen Almond / The Metropolitan Opera
“Heggie’s music is vibrant, generous, lovely, dark and deep. His score is lush and evocative — brackish with tinny bits of percussion and little flourishes of woodwinds (buoys and gulls?). The storms he conjures have to them a proper froth — a surface of shimmery strings, coursing undercurrents of deep-blue cello and bass, and heroic brass that seemed to spray over the edges of the orchestra pit. Heggie is also able to inject vulnerability where it has no rightful place in the Pequod, tapering the music down to a lonely clarinet as though paring a piece of scrimshaw. These moments, more than any of the maelstroms, are what give “Moby-Dick” its sense of emotional scale.”
Washington Post
“The adaptation is direct and clear. ‘Moby-Dick’ stretches across a year or so, but in a linear way. It never leaves the ship Pequod and its salty surroundings. Its characters are flesh-and-blood people. Heggie and Scheer have embraced the kind of ensembles — duets, trios, quartets — that allow this art form to present multiple perspectives at once. In a ruminative aria, Starbuck mulls whether to murder the sleeping Ahab to save himself and his shipmates. In the end, he can’t bring himself to do it, and he slinks out as Ahab softly moans and the curtain falls. The sequence is riveting. When Ahab finally lets down his guard with Starbuck and confronts the cost of his single-minded mania, it is the calm before the final, doomed hunt, and Heggie endows it with real tenderness.”
The New York Times
“Moby-Dick delivered some real beauty and power. It opens with the ship already at sea and compresses one year’s worth of time into its scenes. The opera is the chase, the tragedies that ensue, and the resolution. The opera is tremendous. Act II starts with a slow burning fire, the music is much richer and has a sense of inevitability, and even calmer moments, like the encounter with the ship Rachel, are full of tension. The climax was like the slow eruption of a volcano, music and physical action coming together with a real feeling of tragedy. The performances brought this out, but it’s Heggie’s music that drove them.”
New York Classical Review
“A very good night at the Metropolitan Opera—and a good night for American opera. Heggie has been prominent at the Met of late. His Dead Man Walking opened the 2023–24 season. Heggie is deft at his job, and various musical qualities go into Moby-Dick. The score is watery, mystical, and ruminative. It is frenetic, melismatic, and anthemic. There is a touch of Glassian minimalism, and a touch of the folkloric. Foglia’s production is a superb partner of the score, the story, the libretto. It is always satisfying to report a good night. But to report a good night of American opera? Even more so.”
New Criterion
“Heggie and Scheer’s adaptation is ambitious. What cannot be questioned is Heggie’s skill at vocal writing, allowing for achingly lyrical lines to be heard even above the tumultuous orchestra. Jovanovich’s Ahab gets the most interesting music, unrelentingly Wagnerian in its vocal demands. Ahab’s hysteria contrasts with his first mate, Starbuck, the moral centre of the story [with] long Puccini-like lines in his big aria.”
The Times
“Heggie and Scheer’s opera is an excellent musical romp, with some deeply moving moments and excellent character development along the way. Imagine a starry sky, where the points of constellations slowly join in lines and eventually form a ship, the Pequod, which rushes towards you as the music explodes, dominating the stage. The confrontations are a constant, and unresolved. Here is Heggie at his soaring melodious best. Next in the wow factor stakes is an Act II duet, a moment of beautiful melody and tranquillity, the turning point of the opera. In Moby-Dick the Heggie, Scheer collaboration has given audiences an opera worthy of the totemic Henry Melville novel. Compact, as true to the book as possible – it is a remarkable achievement.”
Reaction
“Heggie and Scheer’s Moby-Dick has been met with success since its premiere. The production has now arrived, expanded for the Met’s huge stage, teeming with life aboard the Pequod. The production contains some of the most compelling moments and bright spots in the Met’s season – Heggie’s lush writing for orchestra, ravishing arias, lively scenes, and lusty choruses.”
The Observer
“Heggie effectively evoked the nautical atmosphere right from the prelude by the extensive use of woodwinds, metallophones, harps and violins in the high register, with evanescent effects. At other times, the rhythm of the waves was evoked by ostinato arpeggios, or by groups of pulsating and pressing notes. In moments of storm, there were great upheavals in the full orchestra and, with an original timbre invention, the whale's breath was made by rubbing the whips on the snare drum. Heggie's music is very elegant and effective in musically rendering the action. In the score there are moments of deep lyricism, excited music (such as the storm and whaling scenes), or poetic (such as when the young sailor Pip is lost at sea and sings to be found), or carefree (such as the sailors' songs).”
Opera Click
“The superb Met Orchestra did full justice to Heggie’s score in many vivid colors. Speaking of the score, it is captivating, delicious, and sweepingly grand. Heggie and Scheer have done an admirable job of wrestling Herman Melville’s elusive mastodon of a novel down into a tight and flowing three hours.”
Girl of the Golden Met
“During the intermission of ‘Moby Dick’ I kept hearing something. People humming, singing, even whistling. What exactly? The glorious melody that caps Starbuck’s monologue at the end of the first part of the opera as he implores God’s aid in a moment of crossroads. I found myself doing the same. And when the night was over, I found myself humming other sections of the opera. That’s never happened before or during any contemporary opera I’ve seen. It’s not that hummable tunes and memorable melodies in contemporary opera are a rarity (they’re not), but truly compelling ones are. Heggie uses motifs and melodies at the service of a larger musical tapestry, constantly painting with sound, and immersing the listener into a musical landscape. The word “Wagnerian” gets thrown around a lot when analyzing opera, but most of the time it’s lip service and little else. But the word truly applies here. That melody that people couldn’t stop humming? It’s there throughout, but evolves gradually before being allowed to flower in its splendor and beauty. And the score is awash in other leitmotifs, each allowed different evolutions and explorations. The orchestra is also very much a character in the story. You could almost describe it as personifying nature itself. There is a constant sense of propulsion, the orchestra restless like the ocean, ostinato patterns of waves dominant. These are juxtaposed with moments of orchestral stillness, the calm before the storm. Meanwhile, vocalists get ample solos, duets, and ensembles. We often take for granted how crucial this is in our interaction with opera. We live in a world of immediate satisfaction and the resulting stories must always move forward. Time for reflection, for immersion, for mere enjoyment, are often thrown aside in favor of movement and a constant stream of information. ‘Moby Dick’ takes its time. And Heggie and Scheer allow us to live with these characters through their musical interactions. It truly feels like Heggie is digging into the well of great opera to conjure up what, in my view, is his most fascinating work. The immersion of music and text creates something altogether epic and intimate. Opera in its purest form. You could watch ‘Moby Dick’ and its characters and see relevance to modern-day politics. Or you could see other human notions and themes reflected across different moments of history. ‘Moby Dick’ is an opera about perspective as much as it is about obsession. Heggie’s music was a gift the vibrancy and flow that it merited, the tone painting clear. If there’s a contemporary opera that should make a comeback as soon as possible, this is one. And hopefully, it then gets a much-deserved HD rendition. In the meantime, it’s imperative that people head to the Met Opera over the next several weeks and immerse themselves in this incredible opera.”
OperaWire
“An impressive track record… Heggie's compositional style is a huge factor [in] the work’s proliferation. The gratefully written vocal lines offer any number of expressive opportunities: He is the rare contemporary opera composer who seems to proceed from an understanding of the voice and its mechanisms. The orchestral commentary is beguiling, especially in its portrayal of the heavens and the seas.”
Musical America
“Moby-Dick, succinctly adapted by composer Jake Heggie with Gene Scheer’s taut libretto, roared into the Met Monday night and begged only one question: What took so long for it to get here? It had everything that an opera audience could wish for in a rapid-fire evening of singing, dancing and great drama. The work has a score filled with thrilling highs, an inventive production, and performers who were shown to their best advantage. Singers often rave about how well Heggie writes for the voice and how much they love singing his music. That was certainly much in evidence in his admirable work on Moby-Dick, even when it is as challenging as it is from Ahab’s entrance. Even when we know that, clearly, things will not end well for these people we have come to know so well, the music carries us along. This is surely a work that can take the Met forward into the next century – and deserves to be heard and then heard again.”
Broadway World
“Heggie’s Moby-Dick gives the feeling of narrowing and focusing the vast, Shandyesque literary canvas of the novel. How could one possibly imagine an operatic treatment of Melville’s brilliant essay chapter on ‘The whiteness of the whale’? Yet the opera can explore the more intimate dramas of Moby-Dick, as when Greenhorn lies down in the coffin that Queequeg has prepared for himself and sings about human madness in a plaintive tenor aria accompanied by an eerie solo oboe – one of many striking scenes in this fascinating and beautiful production.”
Times Literary Supplement
“Everything that an opera lover could hope for: a taut, intelligently written libretto; a haunting, hugely effective score; great singing, dancing and acting; and a splendidly inventive staging. With echoes of Wagner, Debussy, Britten and Barber, Heggie’s vibrantly orchestrated score is highly atmospheric, lyrical, gripping. The music bursts with leitmotifs that constantly alter and evoke the loneliness of life out on the ocean and the changing moods and power of the sea though cinematic textures, dynamic contrasts and fragmented melodies – all creating a sense of epic scale and emotion.”
Bachtrack
“An undeniable success. This staging offers a fresh opportunity to assess how the opera holds its own in one of the world’s most prestigious houses. Ahab’s arias and confrontations with Starbuck continue to serve, as in the novel, as powerful expressions of his determination to confront the unknown forces of existence no matter the cost – for himself and others. Starbuck’s clashes with Ahab, set in starkly contrasting musical lines, heighten the opera’s dramatic tension, illustrating the struggle between reason and obsession. By foregrounding action over exposition and framing the story as a relentless march toward doom, Scheer and Heggie transformed Moby-Dick into a gripping theatrical experience without losing sight of the novel’s thematic weight. In doing so, the opera retains the essence of Melville’s vision: a meditation on fate, freewill and the terrifying power of human obsession. This sense of inescapable fate, of a man forging his own doom with every step forward, makes Moby-Dick not only an epic novel but a natural fit for operatic tragedy. Heggie’s is a score of striking immediacy, built on lyrical accessibility and cinematic pacing. He favors sweeping melodic lines and clear harmonic language. In his approach, the ocean is evoked through orchestral surges and ostinato-driven rhythms. As one of the multiple contemporary operas recently staged at the Met, Moby-Dick stands among the most memorable – an opera that gives Melville’s story a striking new life on the stage.”
Seen and Heard International
“The Great White Whale has been waiting in the wings of the Metropolitan Opera for years. It signifies a breakthrough of storytelling through advanced stage technology. Moby-Dick has a hugely effective score that is constructed as a through-composed orchestral piece built on a series of chameleon-like motifs that morph through and haunt the score, many of them evoking the loneliness of life at sea. Choruses capture the crew’s group psychology in its many forms. Heggie contours his music to the emotional progression at hand, rather than including typically constructed arias.”
Financial Times